Does ‘The Leftovers’ Finale Let The Mystery Be?

A review of The Leftovers series finale coming up just as soon as we get to the ooey gooey…

“I’m here.” -Nora

The whole point of Mad Libs — or, if they’re custom-written by the Reverend Jamison himself, Matt Libs — is that you don’t know in what context any of the nouns, adjectives, or proper names you volunteer will be used, which can result in Nora unwittingly describing her place of employment as “the Department of Sudden Diarrhea,” or her age as 417.

The Leftovers this season has often been so strange and seemingly random that, if it weren’t for the sheer artistry from all involved, it might be easy to assume that Damon Lindelof and company were generating story ideas via Mad Libs:It’s easy to fill in blanks when you don’t even know what the question is, much harder when you do, especially when you’re dealing with a show as intentionally ambiguous as this one. I can tell you where “The Book of Nora” takes place (rural Australia), roughly when (a decade or two after Kevin and Nora split), and most of what happens in it (Kevin and Nora reconcile after all their time apart). But what am I to do with these two that bookend the series finale?

The answers would seem to be linked. If Nora did go through the machine, she’s telling Kevin, and us, the truth about what she saw, and what happened to the Departed. If she panicked at the last second and said no, then she invented the parallel world where the Departed went and she followed, as a lie to conceal her cowardice about pursuing her kids wherever they might be, and then about not reconnecting with Kevin and her other loved ones back on Earth.

At the episode’s beginning, Nora tells Dr. Bekker, with all the righteous indignation Carrie Coon can muster — which, like every other emotion Coon is asked to play in the finale, is a lot — that she doesn’t lie. But later we see the Australian nun lie with equal conviction about the man who just climbed down a ladder from her bedroom window, and Kevin initially seems quite committed to the lie he has chosen to tell in which he and Nora were just nodding acquaintances from Mapleton who never fell in love, never adopted a baby, never had to literally chain themselves together at night, never endured fire and brimstone and Purgatory and madness. It’s easier than it seems to tell a lie convincingly, and we know that Nora’s statement about lying is itself a lie. Nora Jamison Durst lies. All. The. Time. To herself. To others. About how she broke her arm. About how composed or destroyed she may be at any given moment. About her true feelings for her Departed, adulterous husband. About how much it hurt to give up custody of Lily. About her desire to go through the LADR machine. About how much she loves Kevin Garvey.

Would one more lie — one grand lie that will only be shared between two people: herself and her lying lover Kevin — really be beyond her?

You can look at Nora’s concluding monologue in one of two ways. In the first, she is telling the truth, and the sound she made right before the LADR machine prepared to fire upon her was just an involuntary gasp as the chamber filled with liquid. She went through, and discovered that, from the point of view of the Departed — who were living in an identical but much less populated world — it was everyone else who vanished, and not them. She spent years getting from Melbourne to Mapleton, got so close to Doug and the kids that she could practically touch them, before realizing that they had moved on emotionally in a way she never could, and were better off never again seeing Nora Cursed. She then traveled for many more years until she could track down Dr. Van Eeghen and convince him to rebuild his machine on that side to send her home, and at that point began a self-imposed exile Down Under because she felt people in her original universe wouldn’t believe her, and/or also would do well to think she was dead.

In the other way, Nora is lying like she just had a motorcycle man in her bedroom. Her gasp was the start of a last-ditch protest. Dr. Eden turned off the machine (while Dr. Bekker laughed smugly about her instincts being right again), Nora apologized profusely and begged her brother to tell everyone that she went through and was never coming back. And, drowning in shame over the cowardice that prevented her from risking death for the tiny chance of finding her family alive and well in the manner she will later describe to Kevin, she still chooses exile in Australia, just much earlier than she will claim.

You can poke holes in either theory, quite easily. If, for instance, the Departed on Earth-2 (the reality where Balki, Shaquille O’Neal, and Nora’s husband and kids went) are physically okay, but even more overwhelmed with sadness at not knowing what happened to all those who stayed on Earth-1 (the reality where Cousin Larry, Kobe Bryant, and Nora all were at the start of the series), then why wouldn’t Dr. Van Eeghen have already built a second LADR machine so he could go back (or send other people back) to let Earth-1 know what was happening and try to figure out a way to transport a large group of people across the barrier at once? (Send J-Lo, Gary Busey, and Anthony Bourdain on a global “See? The Departed aren’t really dead, and we may have a way to get the others back!” tour, and see how much money they would raise.) For that matter, given Nora’s keen and stated awareness of how much emotional pain most of the people on Earth-2 were in, coupled with her own knowledge of what it was like for her to endure the same level of pain for seven years on Earth-1, would she really be so cold and selfish as to not go screaming from the rooftops about what she had seen(*), with Eden and Bekker along to support her claim? And conversely, if Nora walked out of that truck rather than vanishing from it, would whatever mortification she felt over not actually being, as Matt once dubbed her, The Bravest Girl On Earth, really overwhelm her desire to be there for her brother as he slowly died of cancer?

(*) Wouldn’t, for instance, the mom from the series’ opening scene still desperately want to find her missing son Sam, assuming the dad who vanished from the laundromat parking lot at the same time as Sam was able to care for him for all the years in between?

You can, like with organized religion itself, choose to believe or to be a skeptic about the tale Nora spins for Kevin — I started out believing her, then found myself interrogating the story — but it doesn’t really matter. In the end, you fill in the two most important blanks in this particular Matt Lib the same way: Nora declined a chance to reunite with her family (whether abstract and infinitesimal or right in front of her face), and she felt such self-loathing over that choice, and the mess she had made of things with Kevin, that she opted for a life sentence out in the middle of nowhere, caring for her birds, occasionally calling Laurie — who is very much not dead — for emotional support, and otherwise just trying to get through each day the same way she did for the seven years between when her family vanished and when she sat naked in the LADR chamber: grieving all she has lost, but unable or unwilling to fully articulate that loss to a world that can’t quite appreciate it. There are notable differences between the two, but the one that truly separates Nora’s version from the skeptic’s take is what the nun tells Nora when suggesting the missing birds really are going past their 50-mile ranges to deliver messages of love around the world: “It’s just a nicer story.”

When Kevin sits at Nora’s table and hears her talk about how afraid she was that he wouldn’t believe her, he replies, “Of course I believe you. You’re here.” Kevin has never really been a man of faith, not even when he appeared to be making repeat trips to the underworld, and even here he isn’t really expressing belief in a higher power, or some kind of intergalactic mitosis where the split wasn’t even. He has faith in Nora Durst, who is sitting across the table from him, giving him a look suggesting that, after all these years, she might be willing to take him back despite the horrible things they said to each other in that hotel in Melbourne. He needs her back, and she in turn needs him to believe her story, so he does.

Kevin admits that he pretended they barely knew each other as a way to erase all the terrible things he said and did to her, so he can understand the notion of making up a better version of the past in hopes of improving your present. He will never know with absolute certainty the truth about where Nora’s been, and he won’t much care because he’ll have her with him now. Those of us who have watched these three extraordinary seasons of television will never know for sure, because Lindelof, Perrotta, et al elected to cut straight from Nora’s gasp in the chamber to Nora’s new life as “Sarah.” They tell us an explanation for the Sudden Departure, but they never show it to us, leaving it as one more blank we’ll have to fill in about the story ourselves, along with why Laurie chose to come out of the water that morning rather than drowning herself — or, for that matter, related questions in the stories of our own lives, like what happens when we die, and how those left behind are meant to cope with our absence.

The story of Earth-2 evokes many blanks we still have to fill in about this life, if there’s a next one, and what it might be like. If the rest of the Dursts have moved on without Nora, does she really have a place with them now that she’s ascended the LADR to what she thought would be her final reward? If a man dies at 35, is he truly in Heaven if it’s without the wife he adored for a decade? And what happens if the wife soon remarries and is just as happy with another man for the next 40 years? With whom does she spend an eternity? My best friend Todd died of leukemia before we even got to elementary school; if there’s an afterlife, has he been aging all this time, or will we one day reunite with me hopefully an old man and Todd still a little boy? Or is death itself one big blank, never to be filled in with the grossest noun or most ridiculous name you can think of, or by anything at all?

The Leftovers was a show about those blanks, and about how impossible it truly is to know what to put in them, so of course it should end with ambiguity. Kevin is happy to accept how this blank has been filled, and we can fill it another way if we prefer. Sometime on Departure Day — whether during the phone call with Jill and Tommy, or while she was sinking to the bottom of Port Phillip Bay — Laurie decided she’d rather take the certainty of this life than the blank of what comes after. The show deliberately skips past that, too, choosing to instead show Laurie as a happy grandma, having found the same peace that Matt did in between when he spoke with David Burton and when the cancer took him.

We can treat this like Lindelof’s previous series, or so many other great dramas of this century, and demand answers. Or we can recognize that The Leftovers never promised any — that, both within the narrative and throughout Lindelof’s publicity for the show over the years, it could not have been more clear that answers to metaphysical questions were besides the point — and we can just, like the Iris DeMent song that returned to serve as the theme music one final time, let the mystery be. Wherever you go, there you are. Wherever Nora went that morning in the Melbourne parking lot, here she is now. And Kevin is lucky to have her, just as we are lucky to get to enjoy their difficult but ultimately happy reconciliation.

This story has always been cosmic in scope, intimate at heart, and this proved true throughout the final season. Matt Jamison meets God (or a man claiming to be He) and their conversation quickly becomes all about Matt Jamison. Kevin Sr. is determined to prevent a flood that will drown the world, when really he’s just desperate for some purpose to his own life, as well as a connection to that trip he took when he and Kevin were in their deepest throes of grief after the death of his wife. Kevin blows up an entire reality (albeit one he may just be hallucinating) purely for the sake of his own emotional growth.

So the most powerful scene of “The Book of Nora” isn’t Nora climbing into the machine that will fling her atoms somewhere across time and space. Nor is it Nora offering an explanation for where she went and what happened to the Departed. No, this tale that crossed barriers between universes, between life and death itself, reaches its emotional climax with a scene of two lonely people huddled together on a dance floor at a stranger’s wedding, swaying to the music of Otis Redding, choking back tears at the thought of all the years they lost because they were each too afraid to admit they really loved each other.

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That was it. The Book of Nora was a nice companion to the first episode of the series, the Book of Kevin, and it showed that, even though the series presented itself as a grand metaphysical mystery, it also was, at its heart, a love story. Also, HBO wisely warned us in its description of the episode “Nothing is answered. Everything is answered. And then it ends.”

I think one of the big questions that will drive people crazy is where did the episode take place, and if the story that Nora tells at the end is true. Did she really go through the LADR machine, only to come back? After three seasons wanting to be with her kids, she sees them and decides to turn around and not talk to them? All of those are legitimate questions, but I also think that those questions are missing the point. If she went through the LADR machine or not, what the final scene is telling us is that she finally has a story to tell and someone to tell it. She has finally written the Book of Nora and, after Kevin acceptance of it, they are both ready to write their common story.

I will miss watching a show that was not only engaging, but that it made me think and reflect about important questions, about the nature of existence, and the universe. The answers, were never supposed to come from the show, or from Lindelof, but from us. The Leftovers was just a great vehicle to ask those questions, letting us come up with our own answers, and prodding us to write our own narratives in order to make sense of the world around us. So thanks Damon Lindelof and the rest of the writers in the show for creating such a beautiful piece of storytelling. I will miss watching it and thinking about the show every Sunday.

Thanks Alan for all of your recaps. They really helped make sense of what it was, no doubt a complex but fascinating show!

I wrote more about the episode in my recap (see below), which includes a quote from a preliminary conversation I had about the finale with Reza Aslan, a consulting producer of the show and a religious scholar that helped with many of the religious themes of the series. I will post a long interview with him on my blog on Wednesday. [goo.gl]

My vote is for it being the truth since I can’t believe she would tell a whopper that big. After all that time seems more in character for her to just admit it. Also, Matt would have blabbed to someone that she was still around given his inevitable misgivings about lying to everyone. I’d also note that with only 2 percent of the population constructing a machine of that technical complexity would be quite difficult. You’d have to track down from among all the remaining people a few dozen with hundreds of high skills sets. So the time frame of the show seems about right for that to occur. Even if we assume that the scientist would begin right away trying to track down all those people he wouldn’t necessarily be done by the time Nora showed up.

Thanks to Alan for the great write-ups, and to the creators of this show and the original book for a bizarre yet beautiful ride. For emotional impact, many of these episodes rank with the best episodes of Lost, and the ending surpasses the latter in my opinion. I’m fine with the ambiguity. To boot I don’t think I have ever heard Robin Trower on a Soundtrack before. Bridge of Sighs or Daydream would have been my guess for a Trower/Dewar first but I’ll take what I can get.

I don’t really get the point of trying to deconstruct whether it was an invented story or not. One of the main themes of this particular season was examining (and dissecting) the elaborate belief-systems and stories we humans construct in order to deal with grief, loss, and our own weaknesses (i.e. Kevins Jr & Sr, Nora, Laurie, Matt, etc).

Instead of wondering whether the Book of Kevin or the Book of Nora actually happened, look at from the perspective of who Kevin and Nora were at that point in their lives – and what each would need in order to be able to carry on.

For Nora, it was a rational explanation for the Departure and a “happy ending” for her lost family – even if it was without her.
For Kevin, it was subjecting himself, in a thriller-like narrative, to the brutal truth about his buried feelings and unexamined behavior,and then blowing up that other self and his world.

“But he did rebuild the machine. He sent Nora back, so it couldn’t be that difficult. So why not just start sending people back? Don’t buy it.”

#1) The scientists in Earth-1 also are not advertising what they’re doing, despite being absolutely certain that they are sending people to the same destination as the Departed. Dr. Van Eeghen would have all the same reasons for keeping quiet as they do.

#2) If you claim the difference between Earth-1’s viewpoint and Earth-2’s viewpoint is that people on Earth-2 know the machine works and sends people safety across… well, not precisely. Earth-2 knows that Earth-1’s machine works at sending people to Earth-2. But Earth-2’s machine would have to do something different — send people to Earth-1. Would the same “address” work in both Earth’s? Or if you put it Earth-2’s “address” in Earth-2, does it still keep you in Earth-2? Or would it send you somewhere else in the multiverse to die? In other words, Dr. Van Eeghen knows that his machine transports people safely (which, again, Bekker seems certain of as well), and now he knows that his Earth-1 machine is properly calibrated to deliver people to Earth-2, but there’s no reason to believe he’s absolutely certain about where his Earth-2 machine would send people.

#3) If your rebuttal to that is that he can use the same science on Earth-2 that he used on Earth-1 to discern the correct “address,” there are plenty of plausible reasons why he wouldn’t be able to. On Earth-1, he began gathering data very soon after the Departure, while on Earth-2, he’d be almost 7 years behind, and perhaps the radioactive signature of the Departure will have faded too much by then (radioactive decay is exponential, after all). Also, he assembled a team of qualified scientists in Earth-1 to help him with this; suffice it to say that this task would be significantly more difficult with 98% of the population gone, as Anon.z.Darth pointed out. (Also, what are the chances that Earth-2 could be training more qualified scientists? If you were a Ph.D. candidate on Earth-1, there’s a 96.04% chance that both you and your advisor remained on Earth-1 after the Departure. On Earth-2, so few experts remained to train others because so few people remained.)

#4) Even if Dr. Van Eeghen was certain that his Earth-2 machine worked for Nora and that he could safely transport people back to Earth-1, he would know that widespread knowledge of this would lead to a demand that he couldn’t possibly fill on his own, which would probably lead to rioting and violence (you saw how it was when people weren’t allowed into Miracle, imagine what it would be like when people are told they aren’t allowed to see their loved ones again?) Maybe Dr. Van Eeghen would want to quietly help only those who have lost the most, as Bekker did on Earth-1. Or maybe Dr. Van Eeghen would be a little bit selfish and decide that after all he went through to get to see his Departed loved ones again, he’s not going to risk the comfort of his current life just to altruistically help others.

So I think there are plenty of logical reasons that Nora’s story could be plausible, just as there are plenty of emotional reasons that the story that she bailed on the experiment and ghosted her brother, nephew, and friends for 15 years is implausible.

I agree. I don’t think it matters much but if there were “no planes because there weren’t enough pilots”. Surely there weren’t enough people to manufacture the parts needed for what appeared to be a particular accelerator of sorts.

Bleary’s point #2 is an important one, and one I hadn’t considered before. There’s no guarantee that these are two mirror opposite worlds, and that the exact combination of chemicals and radiation that worked to send people from Earth-1 to Earth-2 would also send them back to Earth-1. It took the scientists on Earth-1 at least 5-6 years of research to detect the precise radiation present where the 2% departed from, and it would likely take this single scientist a long time also to duplicate that process on Earth-2.

Alan, I’ve enjoyed each and every one of your reviews for this show and will dearly miss them, so THANK YOU. This finale, like the entire series before it, floored me. Truly remarkable storytelling, truly remarkable art.

Alan, just a huge thank you for all of the insight, honesty, and thoughtfulness you have brought throughout this incredible series. There is so much about the show that I would never have recognized or appreciated without your reviews.

I wasn’t entirely enjoying the finale as much as I enjoyed last week’s episode while watching it, but after some time to think, I’m quite satisfied with it. It was a very Leftovers finale. It created questions, and then answered them. Created mysteries, then resolved them. And it left us with ambiguity, as always. But most importantly, it was a vehicle for amazing writing and an amazing performance from Carrie Coon. The single take monologue at the beginning was breathtaking.

I’ll miss this show dearly, as well as Alan’s reviews. But I also can’t wait to see what all these individuals (Coon, Lindelof, Leder, Dowd, etc) do next.

Damn it, you said exactly what I was going to say. This is pretty much the best I’ve ever scene by far. It had all the emotion of Six Feet Under, all the risk-paying-off-ness of The Shield, and of course every element of the show was firing on all cylinders.

Anything this show decided to do, through it’s entire run, has enraptured me. I have to confess that I wasn’t as IN to this season as 1 and 2, (still brilliant though), but this finale was the best series finale I’ve ever seen, and by a wide margin.

Even the freaking age-makeup worked. Count all the risks they too took, and how it worked brilliantly every time. No external threat at all (no monster to vanquish, or even illness to cope with – just a straight up love story). Not going back, to young Kevin or young Nora, after flashing forward – not even once. Just going for it with the suicide pod / LADR machine.

Lovely review. I thought the finale was excellent–loved how it focused on the love story, and the actors were tremendous. Ultimately, I think only season 2 was transcendent, but it’s hard to sustain genius. This was a worthy conclusion to a great show.

Lots of good stuff, and that was one helluva fast 75 minutes, but it made no sense.

Laurie watched Kevin pine for Nora for years and years, freezing his life for her, and travelling to Australia every vacation to search for her, and she never told Nora?

She must have told her. And, wait, Nora missed him and would have loved to talk to him, but figured, heck, too much time had gone by, so she just let him spend every spare minute searching and pining for her?

I agree it’s a bit of a plot hole, but this could possibly be explained if Laurie and Nora had an agreement that they would never talk about anything personal happening in the U.S. You would think that Nora would at some point at least ask “How’s Kevin doing? Is he still living in Jarden? How is Jill?” but perhaps she made Laurie swear to never tell her anything when they started this relationship over the phone.

MadMeme, I do get the shame part. In fact, I’ve lived it. I understand how it can take on a life of its own, to the point where a paralysis sets in.

But if I were Kevin, and learned Nora had been in touch with Laurie, and therefore knew he’d gone to these monumental, heart-wrenching lengths….yet she wouldn’t grant him even a bit closure, I’d have walked right out of there. And I’m nearly as hung up on Nora as Kevin is!

Nora is absolutely capable of frozen paralysis. But not 15 years of it while knowing Kevin’s spent every spare moment digging up a continent searching for her. That is not believable, and, if true, makes her a monster undeserving of his love. In which case, the finale doesn’t really work.

I just read Lindelof’s interview, and I don’t buy his explanation. He was piecing together a plot, and failed to fully respect his characters. They should come first. This happened, also, re: John’s transformation into chill Bobby McFerrin (and his cringeworthy request to Kevin “Please risk your life to tell Elvie I loved her”). Peak TV shouldn’t treat characters as puppet/mouthpieces for a showrunner’s plotting needs.

Can I love the show (including first season…I’ve been here all along) as much as Alan while still being truly disappointed by placement of plot over character? This was apparently way better than Lost – Lindelof applied many lessons learned – but hopefully his next series will steer clear of this cardinal sin. If so, it should be nearly perfect.

Anticipating the reply “Nora is damaged”, well, so was Pol Pot. But we’ve had no indication she’s gnarled into full-on psychotic heartlessness (cranky mirthlessness, sure).

If she HAS (perhaps her trip to Earth2 was the final straw), then, again, why would the scene be considered in any way romantic? Listen, I’ve persevered with more than my share of whacky, problematic girlfriends. But this was way, way other-level.

And Laurie, letting this happen, deserves some scuba (confidentiality be damned).

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take seriously Kevin’s devoting his entire life – for decades – into Nora questing. Maybe I should relax and accept that as some plot fluff (hey, whacky Kevin….you know how he is!) thrown in, 1975-style, to tug heartstrings without any earned weight in a fictional world.

I need to stop thinking about this. The more I do, the more it unravels.

Agreed it’s not a plot hole. I’d be more tolerant toward one of those.

Lindelof’s explanation requires a titanic amount of seamless deceit from Kevin with everyone in his life, including his confidant, Laurie, over decades. If Kevin’s story is true (and Threroux plays it deadly straight), just for one thing, he’s been at least near-celibate all these years. How’d he explain THAT?

I can understand mild embarrassment re: his Nora attachment, but this would be a scale of lying that would only make sense re: some truly disturbing secret. And he’s freely admitted vastly more bizarre and disturbing things to Laurie – and to near complete strangers – in the past. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, except from a showrunner clutching at thin rationales to justify cheesy cartoonish manipulation of characters to meet plot needs (ala the thinking that John’s so happy with Laurie, and inspired by John’s immortality, that, poof, he’s turned into a completely different guy).

Also, if Laurie didn’t know about his situation, why the flash of fury across Kevin’s face when he discovers she and Nora had been in contact? If he’s kept up some humungous fiction about having moved on from Nora, that wouldn’t be any betrayal.

The flash of fury was grossly insufficient. He should have either dashed out, or else the final scene should have played as the first reel of a horror movie, ‘cuz Nora’s gone Fargo-villain-level cruel. And the dramatic retro-patch of having her bitch unkindly at some nun doesn’t sell that transformation – or Kevin’s unrealistic reaction to it – or the emotional underpinning of the entire finale.

I’m in awe of what this show was able to accomplish. I can’t stop thinking about just how wonderful every bizarre and hilarious and sob including moment was. Alan, having you around to write about it and have a place to go to share the experience with someone (even someone I’ve never met) made it such a more tremendously personal experience. As someone who loved Lost, this was a totally different and ultimately more satisfying, emotionally roller coasting brilliant experiences I’ve ever had. Someday it’s going to get the viewers it deserves and we’ll get that Nora season. In the meantime, I’ve got a tattoo that says “You have no greater purpose” and I’ll keep beating the drum fly these wonderful characters.

I really wish we could “like” comments. Bring that back! I agree, Alan’s words after each episode serve as a companion guide to the series and a hand to hold. Thanks Alan. My two cents that I know are two too many are that Nora never left. In a 2% populated world, why would anyone stay in their weedy suburb, where it all happened. Nora had an epiphany that the three of them are together, wherever they are, and built a story around that thought to cope. No doubt the new Durst family is living in some gorgeous lakeside/mountainside mansion alongside other survivors who attempted to find each other after 98% departed.

the whole episode seemed like another dream sequence. so much so that I was convinced that Nora died in the machine, and everything after was just a dream she was having as she died. in fact I still believe that is the best explanation. I mean come on, all that stuff wirh the beads and the goat? Nora was dreaming.

Great recap, thanks. Thanks to “The Leftovers” crew for a beautiful show. Had the previous episode been Coon’s last with the beach ball story it would have been enough. Then we’re given more. Theroux was great in the scene at Nora’s house explaining how he’d search for her every year during his two week vacation. So many tears. Does S1 really not get that much love? Wasn’t it your favorite show that year? It was pretty great.

I came thisclose to bailing after season one. While compelling, I found it to be so relentlessly bleak and such a chore to watch. Season two was terrific and the final season was good. The ending was perfect. I’m finally ready to forgive Mr. Lindelof.

Guess I’m the weirdo who loved (and cried many times over) the Lost finale, but thought this one was relatively meh, mostly because Linedlof and co. decided to “tell” everything about the fates of our characters instead of “show” what happened to all of them.

I didn’t even consider the possibility that Nora was lying either, since it would betray all the lessons she learned leading up to it. I kinda took the whole “telling” instead of “showing” the other world (which was an awesome explanation btw) as a cop out for the show having a limited budget. Plus I couldn’t really appreciate how nice the dance scene was (which in retrospective really was neat), when I was too focused on either a) the show looking like it straight up copied the Sideways ending from Lost, complete with the memory loss or b ) being an elaborate lie where people vacationed to The Other Side ala the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. I wish the show didn’t have to resort to so many ambiguous tricks and just let me enjoy the characters each having their own catharsis instead of making me guess what was real and what wasn’t the entire time, but whatevs. Not a bad ending (Disclaimer: I’m the guy who still think the Breaking Bad ending is one of the more disappointing ones since Walter “wins”, or that the Friday Night Lightsending was a cop out since the Taylors ultimately ended up leaving Dillon after all they dealt with), I guess I just thought I’d be alot more emotional about it than I was.

Eh, endings are hard and after arguing against the stupid Lost backlash for years on end, I can’t judge an entire show by them. I thought this season as a whole was fantastic and the best one yet, especially the middle of the season where everyone was slowly going insane over their beliefs falling apart. The one two punch of last week’s Kevin episode and this week for Nora kinda sputtered out IMO, but I won’t hold it against The Leftovers because it will still go down as one of the best HBO shows ever. High five Lindelof, too bad only like 100,000 people (including 0 of my friends) ever watched this show.

FYI The Wire has my favorite ending ever. I think Hannibal, Lost, Parks and Recreation, and surprisingly The Office are in my top 5 too (definitely gonna come up with like 5 other shows to add like 5 minutes after I post this ugh).

Personally I loved the finale – although I can understand some of your points (in terms of your own disappointment). But for a show that filmed much of the final season in Australia, I’m not sure the budget was a factor in how they played the final scene. It seems to me it was a deliberate decision (especially since they didn’t even show Nora wandering around the empty parking lot after she woke up) based on the idea of keeping the entire thing simply a narrated story – thus open to interpretation as the truth or a lie.

Amazing review captured my thoughts beautifully – the analytic and poetry parts of your mind! In my opinion the discussion between Matt and Nora in the lawn chairs was the BEST part of the finale and captured the essence of the show for me. Matt talking about being scared of dying but being more scared of living. Living a life with deep faith is easy but living one with no idea what to beleive is scary as hell. This spoke to me as I would prefer to beleive but have not been able to get there yet in my life. Hopefully it will happen for me in the reverse of one Matt Jamison.

– I found Season 1 and 2 to be much more rooted in faith and the possibility of it shortly after the sudden departure and the journey to Miracle. Season 3 was more agnostic which makes sense as time went along and 7 years passed allowing the real world to move on away from faith. Most things this year were explained away or other non-faith reasons made more sense. I prefer to want to beleive so season 3 will always be my least favorite but still an outstanding season.
– I can’t wait to rewatch the entire series and will dial it up before the Wire, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, etc because I will always be able to find entertainment and great shows moving forward however I doubt I will ever find a show quite like this which will hit me emotionally and challenge my mind unless I get a spinoff of Matt and Mary living together going through cancer.

Thanks Alan for all the insight over the years. I was with you from season

However, regarding your review / take on the episode, I was surprised while reading said review to discover a particular take (or lack thereof) of yours on an aspect of the episode. At first, I thought you were just dancing around the presentation of the episode, though I did suspect that perhaps we had read it differently; a suspicion that would be confirmed when you circled back around to this point in one of your asterisk mark notations.

To me, the parallels between this and “Lindelof’s previous series” were not just noteworthy, but stark and specific; Lindelof, obviously affected by and aware of the backlash against LOST due to its finale chose not only to present a brilliant, pleasing and affecting finale to The Leftovers, but chose to pull down his own penis (and brass ball) scanner and literally lay everything on the table by leaning into that aforementioned finale and paralleling it in a multitude of ways.

Reading your review, it felt as though you were only mildly suspicious as to what and where we were once we jumped from the machine to the seagulls, and the presence of Laurie confirmed, for you, the fact that Nora was alive and that we were in a future set time on earth. That blows my mind! If anything, to me, Laurie’s inclusion serve’s solely to cast MORE ambiguity on what is going on and where Nora is. Is she alive or dead? Did she cross over or not? And if so, dead or departed, do you simply end up in the same, forgive me, Sideway’s World afterlife? Kevin showing up and seemingly being a completely different, again, forgive me, Sideways World Kevin only served to further underscore this. I mean, my god, we had a musical set, lantern lit, tented event where our two leads came together and one knew of a previous life shared with the other while said other seemingly knew nothing of such a life. Lindelof leaned SO heavily into the finale of LOST because getting this right clearly meant so much to him. And whether or not I’m reading too much into THAT, I’m still completely dumbfounded that for you, the entire ambiguous presentation of where Nora was and whether or not she was alive or dead seemed to barely register for you.

To conclude, I too will miss this show dearly and only a smidge less so, I will miss deepening my experience of each episode by reading your reviews directly following each viewing. Thanks, Alan!

Why give Kevin such otherworldly ability of resurrection and make absolutely nothing of it in the end? There was no purpose to it at all, all the soul searching could have been done while he was alive, no need to go to such lengths. Now I think it was done just to have some fun with all the spiritual/mystical angle. Quite a cop-out imo. The reunion between Kevin and Nora didn’t feel earned at all. Not with that attitude of hers for 20+ years.

I was born in 1951. I mention that because I’ve been watching television basically since its inception. The Leftovers is without doubt one of the top 3-4 experiences I’ve had over the many decades of watching TV. The acting was unparalleled. The writing was other-worldly (no pun intended), and the direction was spot on. The finale will go down in my “book”, as the most poignant ever to end a series. Whether Nora went through the machine or not is not important. What she came to learn was.

I loved seasons 1 and 2 so much that a third seemed like a coda. The high points of the show were generally in season 2, especially with Karaoke Kevin. I sensed that season 3 was becoming a bit self-aware, as evidenced by the Perfect Strangers gag (funny as that was.) The only episode that I truly loved in S3 was Matt’s.

I’ll watch season 3 again later this year. Maybe I just need another viewing to appreciate it more. Still, great TV nevertheless.

I dunno. What was the point of spending 50 minutes of the series finale having Kevin acting like they never had a life together, only to have him go “ok I was lying, sorry”……they either needed to have it actually be some alternate reality where Nora gets a 2nd chance to do it right with a “new” Kevin, or have him come to her with hat in hand, acknowledging their previous life, and asking for another go-around. The way they did it kind of removed all emotion. I didn’t hate it but it was kind of a lot of “huh?” without any payoff.

For a brief moment, maybe………like if she opened the door and he said “Hi, I’m Kevin Garvey, not sure if you remember me but I was the chief of police in Mapleton” and then they both smile and carry on without any further ruse. The fact that he kept it up for so long, only just just cave in and admit it with no real reason for doing it, was an odd choice. I’m not furious over it, it just didn’t land with me the way it did with just about everyone else on here.

“Love”, for lack of a better word, is a damn hard and intimidating subject to tackle at the highest level. Perhaps the singularly most elusive subject matter there is. Think about how few, if really any, of the “pantheon” of televisions dramas really go at it in their biggest moments. And so I applaud Lindelof & co. for having the conviction to center their final chapter around the tale of Kevin & Nora and all it encompasses. Several moments were as achingly affecting as anything I’ve ever seen on the subject.

I’ll remember The Leftovers for it’s uniqueness above anything else. I’ve never been as fervent a champion as Alan and others were, mostly because I’ve never seen it as being quite as consistently excellent in any particular area (outside of perhaps the acting) as the shows I consider truly transcendent. I’m also a contrarian who still believes season 1 was actually the best work the show did. The focus and visceral nature and emotional wallop was never stronger to me. But this was a show that shined in a myriad of moments, moments that could pack as much complexity and feeling in them as anything aired in this medium, and I’ll miss them dearly.

At times Alan, I swear we share a brain. You nail so many shows with the exact same thoughts I have. It can be chilling at times, mostly with this review. I was traveling this week for work and my wife and I watched the finale separately. Texting back and forth through the show with comments and thoughts. At the end I simply texted her “Perfect”. I then go to your review and see your Matt Libs, ending with your exactly the same summation of the show… The perfect take to the perfect ending. I can’t wait for our next adventure in TV land together Alan.

I’ve loved this show from the start, and this was a fitting and very satisfying finale, one of the top 3 or 4 series finales ever, up there with Breaking Bad and The Shield. A terrific review, Alan, thanks for that.

On truth or lie, if she is telling the truth, we are to believe she found her family, they didn’t instantly recognize her or she otherwise chose to walk away (in which case how would she know her husband had remarried?), and that the physicist had no plans on his own to create a machine to transport people back to World 1, AND, once inspired by Nora to do so, didn’t make a fortune (or at least seal his place in history) by offering it to everyone who wanted to go back. We’re also to believe that Nora, as Alan said, chose not to shout her discovery from the rooftops upon her return.

If she is lying, then she purposely skipped her brother’s funeral, and was so engulfed in shame for not following through with her plan she disavowed everyone and everything she knew (except Laurie), including her young nephew. I choose to believe the latter, especially given what the nun said earlier: “it’s a nicer story.”

In either case, it was a thoughtful, emotional ending that made me feel like our leads arrived at a place where they could move on with a semblance of joy and normalcy. But it will be debated for some time to come (though probably not as passionately as the Sopranos ending).

I’m fine with unanswered questions…..but had hoped the show would go out with at least a bit of the frantic cartwheeling it had all but perfected. Instead it sat around the house and had a cup of tea. Not all in on the centrality of Nora/Kevin either; find a the romance a little banal – a touch Titanic. Would have appreciated a little more of a tell that Nora’s story was a fabrication. Be a relief for her to come down from her throne atop Anti-BS Mountain with a freaking whopper on her rap sheet and let the world accept her just the same. When I tell myself that’s what happened…..then I am completely satisfied.

I’m fine with the fact that they got all the cartwheeling out of the way in the penultimate episode. For me, The Most Powerful Man In The World was the series’ climax and had me on the edge of my seat more than any other episode they’ve done. I prefer to think of that episode as Lindelof’s Ozymandias, with the Book Of Nora left to tie up all the emotional loose ends without much action.

Another Show dear to my heart has ended and I’m heartbroken. But like many times before, it is a comfort to come here, read Alans` recaps and most of the commenters likeminded thoughts.

I’m also one of the few vocal defenders (and admirers) of the lost finale and I had hoped for a better reception of “The Leftovers” finale. I’m very glad that’s the ways it went.

Alan, thank you very much for introducing me to this unique and peculiar but ultimately pantheon-worthy show and for all your insight.

I’m particularly happy about discovering Carrie Coon. What a force of nature! Had I known Miss Coon prior to “The Leftovers” and in an event like the sudden departure she had disappeared, I would have built my own magic machine to bring her back or got through it.

One thought regarding the diverse cope mechanisms and depths thereof.
The Garvey Kids weren’t around that much in season 3 and not only in the phone call between mother and children, there was this vast emotional mismatch.
Adults had more memories to cling to the past. Children and teens made new memories and forgot about the old ones or at least overrode it to an extent. They could regain a joy for life. Much to the contrary, the adults, at least in the main story.

The jabs in this article, and the supposed dislike (perhaps even hatred) of the first season is pretty ridiculous to me. Is the first season darker and tougher to watch in a lot of ways? Sure, but with those moments, no other the final two seasons, in all their greatness, would have much punch at all. In a weird way, “The Leftovers” is the reverse of something like a “Breaking Bad”, that starts relatively lighthearted and then goes super dark. The rawness of the departure still be relatively new meant that the first season was destined to be the darkness. The characters are at their bleakest, the pain still fresh. It’s pretty amazing how the show mimic’d the path that most of goes through as we pass through grief. Definite speed bumps along the way, but we get to a magic hour filled with hope. This show just wouldn’t be the same without the realistic darkness of the first season. I hope, as time goes on, this narrative that it’s somehow a “mutt” gets thrown to the curb where it belongs. It’s just as masterful as the reason of the series.

I came into The Leftovers late and only caught up with everyone here by mid season 3. I really struggled with season one but because of Alan’s love for The Leftovers I kept at it knowing I would be rewarded. And I most certainly was.

Alan, it never ceases to amaze me, when I read your reviews I feel like we are watching two different shows. That’s because you always observe and intuit so much more than I do. And that makes me happy because when I watch this show all over again I’m going to see what you saw and it’ll almost be like watching 3 more seasons. And won’t that be a blast! Thank you, Alan.

Hope it’s not too late to comment. First, thanking Alan for his work on this series in particular. I loved the series finale. But, has anyone considered that there is a third possibility for Nora besides “chickening out” of the transport, or going through and telling a true story afterward? Perhaps the transport was a scam after all–she paid the money, accepted the risk, cried out but stayed in the pod, and it didn’t work. Then, she had nothing to go to and nothing to go back to. She could have been too humiliated to come back to Matt, and she and Kevin were over. Everyone in this episode either lies or tells “a nicer story” but it is not necessary to know whether Alan theory A or B, or Kathy theory C, may have happened. What matters is the ending. Also, have read many fine reviews but none yet that mentioned that when she rescued the sacrificial goat, she took the “sins” (Mardi Gras beads) and put them on herself. That makes her and not Kevin the real Jesus figure. After that, the birds came back home.

Finally saw this. WOW. Beautiful, perfect in every way.
My take-away: people tell/believe the stories they need to. The details don’t matter — just the emotion. Kevin & Nora’s dance was the truth. How well acted by those two!

Reminded me of Life of PI.
Most likely the ‘real’ happenings were more mundane, but hard to admit.
Even Kevin’s story of looking for Nora for years. More likely, his ex-wife told him where Nora was. But his story had an emotional truth and perhaps covered his shame for not looking.

I’ve always felt like the show was confused about Nora and Kevin. Maybe that’s by design. Nora says they are toxic and co-dependent. I really don’t think the problem was that they never admitted that they really loved each other. Obviously they are broken and twisted people- yet I see a lot of television writers who see their relationship in a more conventional television narrative, a will they or won’t they type deal. I disagree quite a bit. The show sketches an outline and wants us to fill it in, like the madlibs you say. One thing that is true though is they obviously have a deep connection. I just don’t think the show hinges on whether they end up together or not. They have connected and found intimacy once again but even that is no guarantee that they “permanently” end up together.

Well, first I suppose I should put my vote in – Nora was clearly, obviously, transparently lying. That’s what makes the point of the episode. Nora has changed from telling lies to and about herself that caused nothing but damage (her inability to accept a new reality where her family is gone and move on) to one where she’s telling lies to and about herself that help her accept the world and grow. Nora Cursed would most CERTAINLY spend fifteen or twenty years in self-imposed exile in Australia out of shame for having been ultimately unable to follow through on the one thing she sacrificed so much of her potential happiness for. It only diminishes the series if she actually went on a magical adventure we never got to see to reach this basic realization about the world.

One thing I will take issue with, however, is how harsh you are with Kevin Jr. Nora is correct when she says that he was right in that hotel room. While Kevin’s attempts at sabotage were simultaneously more perceptible and less understandable (I still don’t quite grasp what was supposed to be drawing him back to “the afterlife”), but Nora’s dogged refusal to just let go and move on was at least as damaging, if not more. If, after seven years, she could not bring herself to accept the world as it is, then one way or another she should have gone to be with those things that she could not let go of. Her denial and refusal to move on constantly hurt everybody around her and this final season was largely about the world in general (the seventh anniversary being the last realistic shot at a credible resolution, with no other religious or metaphysical body on which to hang any faith of a significant explanation remaining once the prospect of the Tribulations fizzled out) and Nora herself finally accepting that the world she lived in now was better than the almost certain oblivion waiting if she held on to her desires.

The Guilty Remnant believed that the world ended on Departure Day, so it’s fitting that the only experience we get with them in the real world this season is seeing them get what they want and finally achieve annihilation. They can’t accept that the world is moving on, they’re toxic to everything they touch for as long as they persist on inserting themselves into everybody’s lives, and ultimately they are destroyed by their belief. Kevin Jr. has to destroy the world where he’s the most powerful man to accept his own insignificance in the face of inevitable loss. Laurie has to accept her own inability to do anything to mitigate the implications of the horrible event that scarred the world seven years ago. Matt has to accept the fact that if there is a god that he will STILL never get any explanation for or justification of all the terrible events of his life and the world’s history. John has to accept that whatever happened with Evie happened (whether he understands the why of it or not) and realize that he can’t fix it or undo it or pretend. Kevin Sr. has to accept his own insignificance in the face of a catastrophe that does not have anything whatsoever to do with him, despite how important he is to his own universe. Everybody in this final season goes through a cycle of acceptance, and Nora is no exception. Finally, in the end, she accepts that she doesn’t need to carry around the shame she imposed upon herself and is allowed to live in the world again, with the ultimately hopeful message here being that, in the unlikely words of James Portnow, the world will welcome her back.

A beautiful season of television and a beautiful exploration of a concept so rarely explored in such depth. It ended precisely how it needed to, and while there are things I would have liked to have (leaving a John episode out of the final season is a particularly difficult decision to justify, and a Michael one probably would have helped him to seem like less of a third wheel), in the end I’m still quite happy with what I got. I only hope that Damon’s next endeavor works out as well.